beat your competition

Few things compare to times when business is booming and you’re able to reach more of your local potential customers. If your offline business can benefit from local search engine traffic, then you should take advantage of it right away. If that’s something that appeals to you, then what you need to do is local SEO, or search engine optimization. Continue reading on as we explore three methods of local SEO, and you’ll like what you discover.

Your profile, for your offline business, is really very important to have, and you should make one at Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The first thing is registering and creating your profile, but before it gets listed they’ll need to verify your offline business address by phone or mail. When you’re doing this, you’ll see that there are not a whole lot of business profiles listed. Local search can be quite effective, and your business profile will help your overall local search optimization.

You should ask for reviews openly if you want your site to become well-known on a local level. If you shy away from this strategy, you will be missing out on a lot of great strategies. Most sites on a local level are absolutely fine with you communicating with your customers and asking for a review. So, why shouldn’t you enjoy all the advantages of this technique?

It’s simply a matter of taking the time to ask your customers personally for a review. Now, that doesn’t mean you have to go out there and do it on a one to one basis. “We would be grateful if you could provide a review of our company on Bing/Google/Yahoo local,” is an effective message you could post. This request can be put in your email signatures, on your thank you page – which they see after signing you for a newsletter or contacting you – or on your website. These reviews will increase the credibility of your business, which will bring you more customers in the future, regardless of whether they are good, bad or ugly.

If you want, you can also put the address for your business prominently on your web pages, and sometimes people put it in their header graphic. This is a courtesy for your visitors, and they’ll be able to see where you are without navigating away. These are the kinds of small details that will help you.

All in all, from the above article we come to understand that local SEO is really important if you want to drive traffic from that is localized and converts well. The biggest benefit local SEO has is that it is easy to rank because you aren’t competing against sites from all over the world.